Play EA E3 Conference Recap

In the first press conference of E3, EA stepped up to show what they have plan for the future of EA Games. They showed off new games that are coming soon and some that will arrive years from now.

First, Respawn Entertainment showed off new Titanfall 2 information. Much like the first game, there will be a multiplayer component that will have six new titans, customization, and a progression system. Unlike the first game, there will be a single player campaign that is designed to flesh out the rest of the Titanfall world. Titanfall 2 will arrive for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on October 28, 2016 with a beta coming soon.

Soon after, EA announced the next game in the long running sports game, Madden NFL 17. EA didn’t show what new features the new iteration will have, but they did mention that the Madden Championship tournament will be bigger than ever.

And to assure that all players of all skill levels are having fun in a competitive style, they introduced three modes of play— Competition, Premier and EA Major that allows all players having fun while still having that competitive edge. Premier is for players that wants a balance between fun and have some serious competition. EA Major is the big prizes. The best players in the world will compete in this and it seems it will all lead to a year long championship tournament. Players of this branch will compete in 1 million dollars in cash and prizes. The championship will begin next year.

After the sports bit, they showed off what everyone wanted to see. Mass Effect Andromeda. Unfortunately Bioware really didn’t show much again, but we did see some gameplay footage run by the Frostbite Engine and it’s looking fantastic. They did say that we will learn more about it later this year, so we need to wait longer to see some uncut footage of gameplay.

One of the coolest things they announced is the new Play to Give program. If you play a certain way and give back to the team, EA will donate up to a million dollars to charity. Right now you can play the following games for charities: Battlefield 4, Battlefield Hardline, Star Wars Battlefront, Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, Madden NFL 16, and EA Sports Fifa.  EA will split a million dollars and given to these charities; HeforShe, Code.org, CODE 2040, National Center for Women & Information Technology, and Special Effect: The Gamers Charity.

You think sports is over? Nope, EA still had one more sports game to show off. FIFA 17 seems to have the most features the series has ever had. Not only that, but they will enhance the way the game is played. The AI, the ball physics and having better plays that can let you dominate the field. One of the new features in Fifa 17, is the ability to play a story mode. The new mode will be about Alex Hunter, an upcoming soccer athlete that is trying to be one of the best soccer players in the business.

Another new features is the ability to be premiere managers. They didn’t delve deep into this mode, but it seems that you will be able to manage everything that is going on to a team. EA said that there will be 4 premiere managers to choose from.

Because of the success of Unravel, EA has begun on a new program called EA Originals. EA Originals will have EA scout all over the world to look for smaller and more unique games. When they find said game, they will back that game up will all the resources that small team needs to ensure that the game is out in the wild. The best part is that all the proceeds will go the that small game development studio and not at EAs hands. This will allow the team to grow and create more unique games. Whether this will work or not remains to be seen, but I do like the idea of this.

The first game for EA Originals is called Fe. Fe is an explorer platformer game where you play as a small cub trying to find out where it is at, what it is, and where it came from. The will not hold your hand and the second you pick up the controller, you can explore anywhere you like. You’ll even start communicating with other life forms like animals and plants. There was no release date set for Fe yet.

Up next, Jade Raymond came up to the stage to name all the studios that are making Star Wars games. DICE is continuing with Star Wars Battlefront with a massive update coming next year. The Visceral Games Star Wars game is coming out in 2018 with a small taste of what’s to come. Respawn Entertainment showed some “behind the scenes” footage of them making the game. Bioware said that they are still working on Star Wars: The Old Republic expansion packs. All of them don’t have names or proper release dates so this made what should have been exciting kind of a boring and a bit staged.

What should have been the most exciting piece of the conference ended up being a bit of a dud. DICE came out and talked about Battlefield 1. After the overwhelming praise the first trailer got, you would expect that EA would show off real gameplay footage on a E3 stage. They didn’t. What we got instead is a In-Game engine footage trailer that looks great, but no live demo. They did have people play some of the multiplayer, but it doesn’t make much sense to me to not show any gameplay footage during the conference to get people excited. At least you can watch an hour long stream of the game being played.

That was the EA’s E3 conference. It was NOT a good conference as it did the one job it had to do and failed. Show live demos of games coming out this year. There is one solace in all this. No 20-minute talk with a sports legend about the art of that sport. As much as this was not a good conference at least it didn’t stoop that low.


Jesse Webster is a Senior Writer for MONG and is now waiting on Bethesda’s conference.

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